Walk Cycle

As can be seen from my previous posts, I looked at a lot of references and tutorials before beginning my own walk cycle to see how other animators had approached this.

I found Francis Jasmin’s waalk cycle compilation very helpful, particularly the second and sixth cycles and found it very interesting to see how changing the key poses within the walk could affect the attitude or personality of the character.

I also found these walk cycle reference videos by EndlessReference incredibly helpful when it came to figuring out the key poses within the walk cycle.

Unlike with my body mechanic, I decided to try and animate my walk cycle in a straight ahead, rather than blocking out the key poses before hand, and kept note of the key poses which I had done. I found this method to be much more difficult than I had originally thought it would be, especially trying to ensure the start and end frames were the same so that it would loop

After completing my first attempt at the walk cycle I asked my group and other members of my class for feedback. Jonny’s feedback for it was to fix the arms to make sure they mirror each other and Lorna was an absolute gem (honestly, my lifesaver in terms of this assignment!) and gave me a very in depth critique.
“Initial movement is sweet, especially the legs! Left arm is good but its movement back seems to be too fast/ snappy. I would offset the elbow key frames to the should by one frame, the do the same from the wrist to the elbow but 2 to see if that helps it be more fluid, cause its timing to the leg seems right. Head and torso are great. Right arm doesn’t seem to move back as much as left, nor is its timing the same by the looks of things, have you mirrored the key frames over so then both arms start/ middle/ end at the same spots but just opposite?
Also did you copy the key frames to carry on the walk on loop it on the graph editor, cause the start of your walk is great, but then it seems to forget some key frames haha.”

I completely could see where they were coming from with their critiques and so tried to take them on board with my final animation.

I did my best to apply what I had learned from these critiques in the final version of my walk cycle, but still has a few mistakes. The arms seem choppy and I feel that there is too much movement in the head, but, overall, I am happy with it. Although I have learned a lot during the course of this assignment, it has really helped me see that animating is not an area within which I would like to specialise!